Integrated circuits are typically fabricated on semiconductor materials and are created using semiconductor manufacturing processes. During the manufacturing processes, several of the same integrated circuits are formed on wafers of semiconductor materials concurrently, and are then separated into individual semiconductor dies. Each of the dies represents a separate semiconductor device, which may be separately packaged and included in a larger electronic system. Examples of semiconductor devices include memory devices, multiprocessor devices, power semiconductor devices, and many others. With regards to memory devices, various types of memory devices exist, including random access memory (RAM), read only memory (ROM), dynamic RAM (DRAM), synchronous dynamic RAM (SDRAM), ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM), magnetic RAM (MRAM), resistive RAM (RRAM), flash memory, and others. As previously described, such memory devices can be produced as an integrated circuit on a semiconductor die. The semiconductor die may be sliced, cut, or “diced” from a wafer of semiconductor material on which the integrated circuit was fabricated.
During the “dicing” process or at other points in the semiconductor manufacturing process (e.g., during packaging of the die), forces on the die may produce cracks in the die. For example, a dicing operation may produce stress on a respective edge of two dies cut from a single wafer. Such stress may lead to a crack in the respective edge of one or both of those dies. Detecting cracks in a die can be a challenging process because many dies may be produced in a semiconductor manufacturing process, to which many stresses may be introduced. Visually inspecting the wafers for cracks in the die may be prohibitively slow and is not practical for large-scale production. Additionally, cracks in the die may not be visually apparent, for example, only apparent under stress, too small, along a line feature and not easily detectable, etc. Accordingly, a need exists for detecting cracks in a die that may be scaled to account for large-scale production of dies.